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The steppe stretches before us, vast and desolate, providing no protection. A mountain range might shield us.

Maybe.

The bottom line?

A containment breach of our experimental fusion reactor will obliterate everything in its path—scorching earth and sky like some unholy dawn.

There’s no escape.

Headlights blink in the far darkness, swarming toward us.

Someone screams behind us—a long, piercing sound that cuts off almost as soon as it starts.

My spine stiffens, adrenaline hot and nauseating in my veins, but I keep running. My lungs burn from the cold, each breath scraping against my throat, but I don’t stop.

“Keep your head down!” the rescuer on my left growls, his voice guttural, tinged with strain.

A deafening pop-crack sounds off to my right—gunfire. I duck instinctively, my body twitching with a grotesque, automatic survival reflex.

Shadows dart across the steppe. I can’t tell where the rescuers are firing or where the guards are still shooting, but the night is alive with chaos: wild bursts of light from nearby muzzle strobe across the frozen ground.

The Chen family runs behind me. Mrs. Chen is half-carrying Kevin despite his garbled protests. He grips her sleeve tightly and stumbles along beside her. A few paces behind them, Rodriguez’s daughter, Maria, trips. Whittman yanks her upright as she sobs, her exhaustion clear even through the haze of cold and noise.

I don’t know if I’m leading them or being carried along, but I knock into Malia’s side, my legs trembling with effort. Her brother, Malikai, slows again, his body sagging—he’s running on fumes—but she screams his name and won’t let him go.

Someone shouts behind us: “Contact rear!”

The night erupts again—a furious cacophony of gunfire and explosions that feels closer than before, too close.

“They’re buying time,” Malia gasps beside me, her voice thin but lucid as we stumble together.

“For who?” I choke out.

“For us,” she says, pulling harder.

I smell the ozone. Taste the bitter, metallic tang of imminent destruction.

Trucks, Jeeps, and armored vehicles converge on our position, their roaring engines sound so alien after months of captivity that it nearly paralyzes me. It’s not the roar of despair—it’s hope, impossibly loud and alive.

My legs are on fire, every step a half-collapse, and the cold air slicing through my throat no longer feels sharp. It feels numb. My body is giving up, but my mind won’t let it.

“Keep moving!” a voice shouts again—someone from the convoy, though I can’t make sense of anything anymore.

I instinctively pat my pocket, fingers probing for the hard edges of the thumb drive. It’s still there. Relief floods through me even as terror pounds in my veins. Everything else can be replaced, but not those calculations and not the modifications I hid from Malfor. Without this drive, all of our suffering and all those deaths mean nothing. The secrets buried in my equations might be the only way to prevent this from happening again.

Something tells me we’ll need them—if we survive this.

The vibrations beneath my feet are relentless now, no longer faint pulses but full-on waves rolling through the ground. The frozen earth shakes under each step, and the resonance echoes through my bones, rattling my teeth and skull.

“There’s no time!” Whittman shouts behind me. His voice is cracked and thin, his breaths coming in gasps, but the panic sharpens enough to cut through the chaos. “The containment fields are collapsing! If the cascade tunnels?—”

“Shut up and run!” A voice barks the order, sharp and commanding, but I don’t know who it belongs to—the rescuers? Another guard?

I’m running blind now, my breaths ragged, dragging freezing air into my lungs so forcefully it feels like knives scraping my throat. My shirt clings to my body, damp with sweat that turns icy against the gusting wind.

The trucks screech to a halt ahead of us. More rescuers swarm out of the vehicles, shouting orders.

“Move!”

“Load them in!”

“This way—go, go, go!”

They cluster around the hostages, ushering us into cargo spaces, stepping into our panic like it’s routine.

Hands reach toward us—desperate orders to climb aboard—but my legs stop cooperating when I reach the closest vehicle.

I stagger into someone—the same black-clad figure who yanked me forward before—and he catches me just as my knees buckle.

“Get in,” he barks sharply, his voice distorted through the helmet.

I’m lifted into the air and hauled into the back of a truck, pitched forward onto cold metal. My cheek hits steel, the impact jarring. Someone’s knee presses into my ribs.

There’s no room to move. No room to breathe. Bodies pile in around me, flesh pressing against flesh, each person clinging to whatever they can grab—metal bars, side panels, each other.

Hands reach for me, and I’m pulled to a seated position. Someone’s hand steadies my shoulder, holding me upright against the inertia pulling me down. Another hand wraps around my wrist, soft but firm.

I think it’s them.

The two men.

The truck jerks, rocking hard as more bodies climb aboard. I barely register who’s pressing against me—faces I’ve seen daily for months but now seem like strangers. It’s nothing but motion, noise, and heat where there should be freezing cold.

A communications device on one of the rescuer’s wrists sparks and dies as I brush against it. He taps at the dead screen with a gloved finger. The man beside him frowns, checking his device.

“Mine’s acting weird. EMG pulse from the facility, maybe?” Neither looks at me as I tuck my trembling hands closer to my body, away from their equipment.

Malia stumbles in behind me, her hand searching blindly for mine. “We’re—” Her voice cracks. “We’re going to make it.”

I clutch her hand, but I don’t believe her. As a doctoral student in nuclear fusion and quantum dynamics, I know what we face.

We won’t survive.

The truck lurches forward, its tires screaming against the frozen terrain. Around us, the other trucks roar to life, forming a convoy as they tear across the steppe.

We barrel through the snow-dusted tundra, bouncing hard over the uneven ground.

“Faster!” someone shouts ahead of us.

I glance back at the burning facility. My breath hitches as I see it; a ripple of light stretching out from the structure like a shockwave waiting to happen.

The quantum cascade has begun.

My mind races, terrified fragments of equations flashing too quickly to answer anything. For one haunting second, I imagine the worst—plasma containment unraveling, tunneling barriers collapsing, energy annihilating everything for miles.

There’s no time for calculations, no time for thought. Just the hum beneath my skin as the annihilation wave builds.

We have minutes, at most, before the end.

People cry and pray around me. Whittman huddles near the back, his arm braced protectively over Maria, who stares silently at the chaos beyond us. Malikai’s head leans against the side panel, sweat dripping from his pale face despite the cold.

Malia grabs my wrist, her fingers ice cold but shaking just as much as mine. “We’re going to make it,” she says, more to herself than to me.

I want to believe her.

The reactor is buried underground. It’s not fire or heat, but something bigger—a miniature sun coming for us.

We race over the steppe, the cold air biting at my skin. Seconds stretch into minutes, and then a mountain range emerges—a black, jagged silhouette etched against the star-streaked night sky. Its sheer bulk swallows the horizon, a menacing shadow blotting out the heavens.

It’s solid, unyielding, and immovable—potentially our only salvation if we can get behind it in time.

The convoy veers sharply, curving around the mountain’s bulk.

My breaths are shallow. My limbs tremble from exhaustion. My gut knows we’re not fast enough.

I can’t see the reactor below ground, but I know what it’s doing. The containment fields are collapsing. Each pulse of light hammering against the sky mimics the rhythm of the cascade below—pressure building, folding in on itself, building violently each second.

I squeeze my eyes shut, throat clenching. All of this—the cold, the noise, the final gasp for freedom—will vanish when the reactor goes critical. The cascade will annihilate everything.

As if sensing the thought, Whittman’s voice carries through the cacophony. “Shield your eyes!” he shouts. “When it blows, don’t look at the?—”

“Hold on!” one of the rescuers roars, grabbing the nearest cargo frame as the truck veers wildly left.

We curve around the ridgeline just as tremors spike into something all-consuming.

My ears pop and then pop again, pressure building deep in my skull, making my teeth ache.

Another truck swerves sharply behind us, nearly tipping over before regaining balance. Someone screams, but the deafening roar of the engines and the crunch of tires against uneven terrain steal their voice.

The vibrations deepen into a symphony of energy so vast and disruptive that even the mountain seems to bend under it.

As atomic nuclear forces are overcome, fusion reactions ignite—a miniature sun born underground.

Light crashes against the edge of the mountains, brighter than anything I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t just illuminate—it burns across the sky, turning night into searing, electric-white day.

Heat follows next, though dampened by the bulk of the mountain.

It rolls over the steppe like a tsunami, turning air into plasma. It collides with the mountain’s bulk, turning it into slag. Heat and light deflect upward into the sky. The mountain groans a low, rumbling roar that carries the weight of something colossal, but we shelter in its shadow.

Protected from annihilation.

The roaring vibrations die out, the light bleeds away, and the frantic noise in my chest subsides just long enough to convince myself I might still be alive.

I slump back against the side panel, my pulse pounding in my skull as everything slows. I don’t understand how the trucks are still moving. I don’t comprehend how I’m still alive. Around me, whispers rise, faint prayers echo, and disbelief fills the air.

We’re still moving. Still here. Still alive.

The cold finds me again, rushing through the cargo bed where my sweat has turned to ice, but I don’t care. All I feel is the engine beneath me and the two strangers bracketing me.

Somehow—miraculously—we survived.

As the adrenaline begins to ebb, an unfamiliar tingling sensation spreads through my fingertips. It’s probably the cold or the aftermath of terror. I flex my hands, watching them tremble against the dim light filtering through the truck’s canvas covering.

I swear something shimmers beneath my skin—a subtle, metallic glint that ripples like liquid silver before disappearing when I touch it.

My nerves are making me hallucinate.

One of the rescuer’s tablets flickers as my hand passes near it, the screen pixelating briefly before returning to normal.

I brush it off as exhaustion playing tricks on my mind. Right now, all that matters is that we made it out alive—me and the thumb drive containing my doctoral thesis.

I pat my pocket again, feeling its reassuring shape. If I’m right, the tiny device might be the key to undoing Malfor’s plans … if I can figure out why my calculations kept showing those anomalous energy signatures.